Le Clown Le Gone?

I got an email on January 17th letting me know that one of the many bloggers I follow had posted something.  This one was by Le Clown.  Notifications that Le Clown had posted yet again on his blog could mean only thing; the prolific bastard had published yet another insightful, painful and/or amusing post.

(Image from dailypost dot wordpress dot com)

For those of you who didn’t follow him, let’s leave it at this – Le Clown’s blog was what yours (or mine) would be if you (or I) were incredibly talented, wildly creative and highly motivated.  Over the life of his blog, “A Clown On Fire”, he added other blog sites, including “The Outlier Collective” and “Black Box Warnings”.

You may have noticed that I am writing about Le Clown in the past tense – how very observant of you.  The reason for this is simple; in the January 17th post, Le Clown said goodbye.  He ended all of his blogs and bid us all adieu.  He thanked everyone for participating and issued a blanket apology to anyone he managed to offend.

I was fortunate to have discovered Le Clown, though truthfully he was hard to miss.  I was tickled when he eventually read some of my posts.  From my perspective, his blogs were tremendously popular and critically acclaimed.  At one point, he asked me to write a post for The Outlier Collective.  I was honored and more than a little apprehensive.  It’s one thing to read someone’s work and be impressed, it’s an entirely different experience to post your own work on their blog.  I wrote a post called “Killing Me Softly With Your Ad” about a tragically stupid and insensitive television ad which Hyundai had briefly aired abroad.  As it happened, the post I had written was well received by Le Clown’s vast audience and got a respectable number of hits and comments.  This would be a great place to put a link to the post, but upon looking for it, I discovered that like everything else Le Clown had a hand in creating on WordPress, it was gone.

Upon realizing that my post had vanished, I was upset.  After thinking about it a little though, I’ve accepted its disappearance.  In this mercurial virtual landscape there is no permanence.  Everything in the world can flash on your screen for one moment and then be gone the next.  Nothing is really forever here, not even Le Clown.

Farewell, Le Clown, see you in the funny papers.

Coming Soon – I Hope It Doesn’t Suck

In yet another example of brilliant people making questionable choices, I’ve been asked by yet another wildly successful blogger to write a guest post.  This time it’s the one and only Le Clown of A Clown On Fire.  He’s on another level of bloggers, his followers have followers.  He’s so successful, that he’s had to diversify in order to share his brilliance more effectively.  One of his blogs is called “The Outlier Collective”.  If you try to write a blog like I do, you just gasped quietly at what an incredible name for a blog that is.  If you don’t write a blog, you probably just took yet another step away from ever doing so, because you know you could never come up with anything remotely as cool as that for a blog name.

True to form, Le Clown’s also got a snappy “TOC” logo for it.  TOC, as we blogging insiders like to call it, is actually a collaborative effort between Le Clown and Mme Weebles, another superstar.  As if it’s not enough that Le Clown has additional blogs with stunning titles, he even collaborates with other supernovas of the blogging community!   Amazing, no?  Le Clown and Mme Weebles find worthy writers and toss them some fertile nuggets about which to write.  A few days later, the magic appears on tens of thousands of computer screens.

Then the unthinkable happened.  Le Clown actually asked me to write a post for The Outlier Collective.  I had to double check my email to make sure it wasn’t a blog version of the Mante Te’o scam.  I could just picture the cackling practical jokers looking at my eager email replies and falling over one another to try to come up with new and elaborate ways to make me look foolish.  Having had imaginary girlfriends for much of my youth, I knew the risks.

As a humble token of my appreciation, I would have included a link to Le Clown’s blog in this awkward post of self-deprecation, but at this very moment, his blog is unavailable for link-age because he’s in the middle of over-hauling it from a visual design standpoint.  That’s right; his old blog format was only really, really impressive, and he’s taken on the job of making it moreso.

Rather than link you to the post tomorrow, I’ll just re-blog it once it’s up, so that I can glom onto the snazzy new-look of A Clown On Fire.  Before you get all critical of my post tomorrow, please remember that it was not my idea to include my ramblings on his site.

By this time Wednesday, life should be getting back to normal.